Thursday, April 24, 2003
FrontPage magazine.com - International Bill of Wrongs By Ben Johnson and Michael Tremoglie
Another one for the "beware of good intentions" file. This time concerning the International Bill of Rights Project. It seems to me that a small group of people could distill about a paragraph's worth of a statement defining a set of universal rights. Anything more than that and one has to wonder if someone's confusing "rights" with "goals."
[...]Article 2, Section 1 (Free Speech) is representative of the nebulous terms and limitations imposed upon human behavior in this utopian manifesto:
"Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to see, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of borders. No one may be coerced into expressing his or her views and convictions or into renouncing them. The only exception is that the urging of violence against individuals or groups based upon race, religion or sex is impermissible."
This language, which recalls the restrictive P.C. speech codes of ultra-leftist universities such as Boyd’s alma mater of Berkeley, brings to mind another, similarly limited constitution: Brezhnev’s Soviet Constitution of 1977. That Orwellian deception (which, coincidentally, also guaranteed "free, qualified medical care" to all citizens) promised endless rights, limited by this phrase: "Enjoyment by citizens of their rights and freedoms must not be to the detriment of the interests of society or the state, or infringe the rights of other citizens." With such restrictions, the Soviets could legally deprive the guaranteed "enjoyment" of these rights to such giants as Aleksandr Solzenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov.[...]
"Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to see, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of borders. No one may be coerced into expressing his or her views and convictions or into renouncing them. The only exception is that the urging of violence against individuals or groups based upon race, religion or sex is impermissible."
This language, which recalls the restrictive P.C. speech codes of ultra-leftist universities such as Boyd’s alma mater of Berkeley, brings to mind another, similarly limited constitution: Brezhnev’s Soviet Constitution of 1977. That Orwellian deception (which, coincidentally, also guaranteed "free, qualified medical care" to all citizens) promised endless rights, limited by this phrase: "Enjoyment by citizens of their rights and freedoms must not be to the detriment of the interests of society or the state, or infringe the rights of other citizens." With such restrictions, the Soviets could legally deprive the guaranteed "enjoyment" of these rights to such giants as Aleksandr Solzenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov.[...]
